A Slop Publisher Sold a Ripoff of My Book on Amazon

Like some (many? most? all?) authors I sometimes check how my book is doing on Amazon and other booksellers. Recently while doing that, I came across another listing on the online retailer: “SUMMARY OF JOSEPH COX’S DARK WIRE,” referring to the book I spent years researching, investigating, and writing. It cost $4.99.

Curious whether this product was an AI-generated rip-off of my work, I bought a copy. Flicking through the digital pages, the summary, rather expectedly, condensed each of my chapters into a few page overview. Details I had gone to incredible lengths to get, including flying around the world to meet criminals face-to-face, or sneaking into a law enforcement conference, or slowly building trust with understandably scared sources was plopped into this new book with little context on how they got there or why they mattered.

For example, here is the original opening of my book, about a drug trafficker called Owen Hanson: 

“In the early morning of September 9, 2015, Owen Hanson opened his Louis Vuitton bag and stuffed it with bundles of cash and three cell phones. The money was for gambling during the round of golf he was scheduled to have that day with a business associate.”

Then the version in the purchased summary:

“On September 9, 2015, Owen Hanson was scheduled to play a round of golf with a business associate.”

It then continues laying out Hanson’s rise and fall. Or really, just the fall. It leaves out much of the narrative detail.

Obviously summary books are not new. Students everywhere have relied on CliffsNotes or other study guides and summaries to get through classes. But AI potentially gives low level publishers, or grifters, a way to churn out summaries and list them for sale.

It’s hard to ultimately tell if this summary was AI-generated. I showed a screenshot of the summary contents to the rest of 404 Media. Emanuel pointed to the other summaries listed by the publisher, called Slingshot Books. Pages and pages of book summaries with generic orange covers.

Amazon removed a mass of Slingshot’s books, including the summary of my own, after I contacted the company for comment. On Tuesday the publisher only had one product listed: an audiobook summary of Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls. Summaries are a common type of low quality, seemingly AI-generated type of book that is common on many platforms that offer ebooks. After a 404 Media investigation into AI-generated books on Hoopla, a service that provides ebooks to public libraries, Hoopla announced that it would remove summaries from its service entirely in order to reduce the number of low quality books, with the exception of HMH Books, the publisher of CliffNotes.

Tim Gillman, an Amazon spokesperson, told me in an email “We limit the publication of summary books that are about other titles in our store, and the title you brought to our attention is no longer available for purchase. We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines. We continue to enhance our protections against non-compliant content, and our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in AI-driven publishing.”

Hachette, the publisher for my book, did not respond to a request for comment. Slingshot was not reachable for comment.

I also found what looks like the same summary from Slingshot on Apple Books. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As for how I feel about all this: on one hand, it’s nice that a company, publisher, person, entity, or whatever considers my book interesting enough (or, I guess, potentially worth the time) to summarize. It would be great if CliffNotes itself made a summary of the book, and used its expertise to communicate some of the more complicated points of the text to a presumably new audience. But that’s not really what seems to be going on with Slingshot, at least judging by the quality of the summary itself and the boilerplate covers each book has. It looks and feels much more like quickly churning something out that can be sold to some sucker on Amazon for five bucks. I spent countless hours reading every encrypted message from drug traffickers I could get a hold of. I eventually walked through the very rooms where the FBI read millions of intercepted messages, and pushed the FBI on what really happened during the operation, including a young man being murdered by users of the FBI’s own encrypted messaging app. And a ton of other work that I almost cannot remember, it was all consuming. Now someone is going to cheapen that work by selling it for pennies? 

404 Media previously reported how AI-generated books about mushroom foraging were on Amazon. At the time, experts were concerned that the books could end up killing someone due to the false information they contained.